


Fifteen

by bexpls



Category: Endeavour (TV), Inspector Morse (TV)
Genre: Episode: s06e05 Cherubim & Seraphim, Established Relationship, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, i still don't know how to write sex so sorry chaps, possibly contains spoilers for cherubim and seraphim, set sometime in season 4, there's a flashforward-thing to that episode so, yeah there's a graphic ish depiction of suicide so don't read if that's a trigger of yours
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 16:55:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18123971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bexpls/pseuds/bexpls
Summary: “Shall we say two o’clock for the post-mortem?” offered Max, and that actually got a smile out of him.It was an in-joke of sorts, at this point. Max never said anything but two o’clock for the PM. There was a reason for this, that wasn’t just an obsessive-compulsive desire to keep everything the same always. If he finished all of his work by four or five o’clock, he could wash up and be home within an hour. More time for his rhododendrons.Lately, his rhododendrons had been somewhat neglected. Because when Max said two o’clock, he wasn’t really talking about the post-mortem.Or, Morse is gay and depressed.TRIGGER WARNING: DEPICTS THE AFTERMATH OF A CHILD'S SUICIDE + SUICIDAL THOUGHTS OF A MAIN CHARACTER





	Fifteen

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE do not read if you're triggered by suicide.

Like always, Morse, Dr DeBryn, and Constable Trewlove were already at the scene when Strange arrived. He had to admit, it did his ego some good; walking over and having the others explain everything to him as soon as he got there. It made him feel a bit like an inspector.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, matey. Still a good while to go before that.

“Morse. Doctor. Constable,” he said. Morse nodded; DeBryn didn’t look up. He was kneeling by the body, making a detailed examination of the right wrist.

“Morning, sir,” said Trewlove.

Strange surveyed the scene. Information room had given him directions to Boxgrove, a children’s home a few minutes’ drive north of the city. He knew of it, of course, but he’d never been given an occasion to go there until today. It was a bit dismal, really. A squat building, brand new about thirteen years ago, and never having had so much as a window-clean since. Even the paving leading from the main road to the front door was dirtier than it should have been, covered with clumps of dirt. The front door was painted black, but nevertheless streaks of grime were clear to see on it. Weeds were growing out of the gaps between the paving stones, the odd dandelion but mostly just tall stalks of grass. Surrounding the building were four-metres-tall iron railings, their black paint peeling off, their tops ending in blunting spikes.

Not a place anyone would want to spend their childhood. Which, Strange supposed, had been proven true in this case.

The information room told him it was a suspected suicide. Now he was actually there, he could cross out the word ‘suspected’ in his notebook. The uniformed officer on the door had directed him to a room on the second floor, usually inhabited, by the name on the door, by a Fletcher Hargreaves. The door was open, and the body was in full view.

He looked sixteen at the outside, his hair curly and too long. He was curled up on his side with one arm outstretched, the one which DeBryn was examining. There was blood everywhere. A great pool of it covered the floor – unpolished floorboards, Strange noted, not even carpet – and there were splatters of it all over the end of the bed.

The room itself was as miserable as the building looked from the outside. There was one shelf made out of a plank of wood that looked like it had just been hacked from the nearest tree, and the only things it held were three paperbacks and a deck of cards. In the corner was a small chest of drawers, but no wardrobe. The bed was short and covered in only a thin cotton blanket. There were no toys, no mementos or personal possessions; nothing whatsoever to suggest a child lived here.

Strange could see why someone living here might want to do themselves in.

“What happened?” he said.

“Suicide, so far as Dr DeBryn can tell,” said Trewlove.

DeBryn finally looked up. “Quite so.” He gently put down the arm he was holding up. “He slit his wrists. Would’ve bled out in a few minutes. The razor’s still in his hand.”

“And he’s Fletcher Hargreaves?” said Strange, pointing to the plaque on the door.

“Yes,” said Trewlove. “Just turned fifteen.”

“Time of death?”

“Four or five hours ago,” replied DeBryn.

Strange glanced at Morse. He was leaning against the wall in the corner, eyes trained on the ceiling, and looking significantly paler than usual. Which was saying something.

“You all right, matey?”

Morse looked over at him, then at the body, then back at the ceiling. “Oh, fine.”

“The DI should be getting here shortly,” said DeBryn. “I’ll deliver my results after the post-mortem, but I can’t see as I’ll learn anything new.” He stood up and picked up his case. “Morse, can I have a word?”

Morse nodded and got up, following DeBryn out of the room. Strange glanced after them, then down at the body.

What a way out to choose, he thought. Knowing what was happening to you but being helpless to stop it, even if you wanted to. And a kid, as well.

“Horrible thing,” he told Trewlove.

“Yes, sir.”

Strange lifted his fist and pointed his thumb at the door. “What’s up with Morse, do you know?”

Trewlove bit her lip. “He was the first on the scene. It was called through earlier this morning, and all the initial report said was a death, no cause or anything. So I think he just had a bit of a shock.”

That was fair, thought Strange. A child’s body was one thing, but being caught off guard by it was another. And in that state? No wonder Morse looked so pale.

 

* * *

 

 

Max led him all the way downstairs and out of the front door before he finally stopped and turned around to speak to him.

“Go home,” he said firmly.

“I –“ Morse swallowed. Max watched him warily. “I can’t. It’s a case.”

“It’s conflict of interest,” said Max.

“No it isn’t,” said Morse. “I didn’t know the boy.”

“You know perfectly well what I’m talking about,” said Max.

Morse rolled his eyes and started to speak, but Max cut him off.

“You can’t work this case,” he said. “Let Strange handle it. Just forget about it.”

Morse folded his arms and looked at the ground. Poor bloke looked like he needed a hug. Max glanced around him, but the uniformed officer was by the front door, and there were a few kids milling about in what seemed to pass for a front garden.

“Shall we say two o’clock for the post-mortem?” offered Max, and that actually got a smile out of him.

It was an in-joke of sorts, at this point. Max never said anything but two o’clock for the PM. There was a reason for this, that wasn’t just an obsessive-compulsive desire to keep to an arbitrary schedule. If he finished all of his work by four or five o’clock, he could wash up and be home within an hour. More time for his rhododendrons.

Lately, his rhododendrons had been somewhat neglected. Because when Max said two o’clock, he wasn’t really talking about the post-mortem.

He was talking about him and Morse.

 

* * *

 

_Morse had told Max about his childhood long before he told Lewis. Back when they were young, a couple of years after they had first met. A few months after they’d become… particular friends, like Thursday used to say. Not that Thursday ever knew about the two of them. Sometimes, the inspector hadn’t been able to see what was right under his nose. Or maybe he and Max had been a lot more discreet than they’d thought._

_No, that can’t have been it. Trewlove knew, and later Fancy. Even Strange knew, though that hadn’t been so much connecting the dots as walking in on Max licking Morse’s neck. None of them ever said anything, except Strange, whose only word on the matter was, “Well, matey, everyone needs someone I suppose.”._

_He hadn’t told Lewis. And he probably wouldn’t ever tell Lewis. One’s sexual activities weren’t something one confided in their bagman. Oh, he just knew what Lewis would say to that. “You aren’t usually bothered about that, sir.” Well maybe he wasn’t, but all the ones Lewis knew about were women. Men were something altogether different. He wished it didn’t have to be like that, but there it was. You couldn’t change the world’s opinions on something like that, no matter how much you wanted to. Not in this time, anyway._

_He remembered the first London Pride, in ’72. Max had wanted to go, the sod. Morse would probably have died of shame, quite literally. Which was awful of him, but what if someone would have seen him there? The Sexual Offences Act of ’64 might have decriminalised being gay, but it didn’t mean that a police officer could drape himself over his boyfriend’s arm for all to see. His job, and Max’s, would’ve been gone quicker than either of them could blink._

_No, he would never tell Lewis. He knew about Max, of course – who didn’t know about Max? – but not about_ him _and Max. He didn’t want Lewis to lose respect for him._

_What he would tell Lewis, however, and what he was about to tell him right now, was about what happened when he was fifteen._

 

* * *

 

 

_Something very strange was going on with Morse. For one thing, he’d insisted on buying the first round. This was such a rare event that Lewis thought he’d better just let him get on with it, and accepted the pint. For the second, he’d gotten himself an orange juice. They were still technically on the clock, after all, and even if Morse was throwing it back didn’t mean Lewis himself had to._

_Maybe it was the fact that the deaths were kids. It was always harder when they were kids. Or maybe it was the suicides. Either way, Lewis wasn’t expecting Morse to be very forthright with whatever was bothering him. It wasn’t exactly his style._

_They were going to go and see Mr and Mrs Garrett in a minute. Morse was being cagey about them for some reason; keeping back information about them, or so it seemed to Lewis. But Lewis hadn’t actually met them yet, so he assumed Morse was just respecting their privacy as a friend, and it was up to Lewis to act as the detective._

_An odd turn of events, he reflected. Morse being the more emotive of the two._

_“Parents,” said Morse, leaning his half-drunk glass of beer on the side. “So often it comes down to parents.”_

_He was talking about Mrs Wilson, whose daughter seemed to have run away from home. Only temporarily, he and Morse had decided: she hadn’t packed a bag or taken any money, so far as her mother could see. Mrs Wilson, who thought that Marilyn Garrett was a bad influence on her own angelic daughter. Mrs Wilson, who imagined that Vicky spent Saturday evenings painting her nails and gossiping in Marilyn’s bedroom, when really she was attending raves and taking drugs. Morse was quite right. It did so often come down to parents._

_The thought troubled him, so he just gave a vague, “Oh, yes.”_

_“Did you get on all right with yours?”_

_“Yeah, mostly,” said Lewis. He smiled – he could remember the worst argument he’d ever had with his mum, when she wouldn’t let him get the train to London to go to a Midnight Addiction concert. “When you’re a kid, you don’t realise, do you?”_

_“Do they quarrel much?”_

_“No, not really.” He was about to launch into an anecdote about the time his mum caught his dad sneaking out of the house to go to the pub when he was supposed to be down with flu, but Morse said:_

_“Mine did. Got divorced when I was twelve.”_

_Lewis stared at him. He couldn’t be drunk, could he? He hadn’t even finished his second pint. He studied him for a moment – no, not drunk. Perfectly sober, in fact. So where was this coming from?_

_“I stayed with my mum, of course. Well, you do, don’t you? And she didn’t have a fancy man, whereas my dad…” He looked up and saw Lewis staring at him, and said, “I’m telling you this for a reason, Lewis, so there’s no need to go spreading it all over the station.”_

_“No, no, I–“_

_“Gwen, she was – she_ is _called Gwen. And they had one baby, Joyce. When I was fifteen, my mother died, so I went to live with them.” He shrugged half-heartedly. “Nowhere else to go. My dad and I, we got on all right. But Gwen… didn’t like me then, doesn’t like me now. Don’t ask me why. She didn’t do anything special against me. It’s just the steady accumulation, they drip, drip, drip of humiliations. Hatreds. When you’re that age…”_

_He kept on pausing, obviously not wanting Lewis to interject, so he didn’t. His face when he had said ‘hatreds’, though… the glazed look behind his eyes. He’d never seen Morse like this before._

_“So I suddenly thought,” he continued, “sod this. I’m getting out of this. It’s not worth it.”_

_“What,” said Lewis, “you ran away?”_

_“I decided to kill myself,” said Morse, matter-of-fact as you please. “I thought of all the ways of doing it. Then I put them in order. One, two, three, all the way to about fifteen. Which would hurt me the most, which would hurt Dad, which would hurt Gwen. I even thought of which would hurt little Joycey least. I liked Joyce.”_

_Lewis couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. Sure, Morse had never exactly shown a zest for life, but he had his pleasures: beer, crosswords, music. No matter how depressing some of that stuff he listened to was, Lewis would never have thought Morse to be suicidal._

_“Then I thought,” said Morse, “’that’s pretty bloody clever what you’ve just done.’ Because I’m vain.”_

_Lewis knew he wasn’t making a joke, but he started to laugh anyway. Morse glanced at him and smiled a bit._

_“I was vain even then. And then I thought, ‘Well, if you’re clever enough to have done all that, well. It’s a waste of a good mind.’”_

_“I can just imagine you saying that,” said Lewis._

_“No one can imagine someone else’s pain, Robbie,” said Morse. “It’s the human tragedy.”_

_Had he – had he ever called Lewis ‘Robbie’ before? Lewis couldn’t think of a time when he had. He took a drink of his orange juice instead of saying ‘I’ll drink to that’, which he didn’t think was very appropriate._

_“But I made a vow,” said Morse. “I wouldn’t forget – I would_ never _forget – how awful it is to be fifteen.”_

_No, Lewis thought. He didn’t think Morse ever would._

 

* * *

 

 

Max had the post-mortem completed by half past one, to save Morse from having to see the body up close and personal, as it were. The body was safely tucked away in the morgue, waiting for something to be done with it. He supposed the council would have to arrange a burial. Whatever happened to it, it was out of his hands so there was no point dwelling on it. He’d done his bit.

Morse arrived punctually, and seemed a bit surprised to see the unoccupied, washed slab.

“Is the party already over?” he said, but without much heart. Making jokes to take the mind off, supposed Max. Which wasn’t Morse’s usual style, but it was hardly a usual case.

“I thought that would be best,” said Max. “Shall we go through to my office?” He indicated the door to his left. Morse nodded and went through.

“Anything to report?”

“Nothing that I didn’t already know,” said Max. “No foul play. No signs of a struggle, no bruising to the arms so no one held him down to cut his wrists for him. A few preliminary scratches to get the feel, then the main event. Definitely suicide.”

Morse lowered himself into Max’s chair, already looking three shades paler than when he’d come in. “A simple ‘no’ would have sufficed.”

“Sorry,” said Max. “Anything at your end?”

“Trewlove found the boy’s diary,” said Morse, after a long breath. “He’d been writing about suicidal thoughts for nearly a year. So it was a matter of time, really.”

“Nothing to suggest he’d been talked into it?”

“Not especially. Just… constantly being put down by the staff. Some bullying on the part of the other kids. A slow but steady stream of emotional abuse, basically.” He shrugged. “Nothing you could charge anyone with.”

“But there’ll be an investigation, presumably?”

“Oh yes, but it’s out of our hands now. And anyway, nothing will be done. Boxgrove is too important to be shut down. Can you imagine how time-consuming it would be to send all the kids to new home?” He grimaced. “Fletcher Hargreaves will just be another statistic. A tragic cautionary tale.” He put his elbows on the desk and rested his chin in his hands.

“Are you okay?” said Max softly.

“You know me,” said Morse.

“Yes, I do know you,” said Max. “Which is how I know how much this particular case means to you. And it’s also how I know that you’ll likely go home and listen to your Rosalind Calloway record on full volume and drink a bottle or two of whiskey. So if you don’t mind, I’ll worry about you.”

Morse dropped his gaze.

“The couch is more comfortable,” said Max, nodding to it. “And I’ll pour you a brandy now if you promise not to have anything later.”

“Promise,” said Morse.

Max wasn’t quite sure whether to believe him, but he crossed over to the cupboard anyway and took out a bottle of brandy and two glasses. He poured some out – slightly less than usual for Morse – and when he turned back, Morse had curled up on the couch. Max sighed. He went and sat next to him, leaving a small distance between them, and handed Morse his brandy.

Morse took a sip. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Max. He glanced at the door, which was closed but not locked. Would it be wrong to…?

Yes, under the present circumstances, it would be very wrong to.

“To Fletcher Hargreaves,” said Morse, raising his glass, “who had probably never had a drink in his life.”

Max laughed and clinked his glass to Morse’s. “He was fifteen, so you would hope not.”

“You’re so naïve,” said Morse, shaking his head. He took another sip of brandy and rested the glass on his stomach. “Do you remember being fifteen?”

Max thought. On his fifteenth birthday, his aunt and uncle bought him a book about the human skeleton. His parents had taken it away, claiming it to be too gruesome, and told him they would let him read it when he was ‘mature enough’. He found it in the bookcase in his father’s study, and read snatches of pages whenever he could. Apart from that, nothing particular exciting about being that age came to mind.

“Somewhat,” was his answer.

“I’ve already told you, haven’t I?” murmured Morse, and of course Max knew what he was referring to.

“Yes, love, you have. Don’t think about it now.”

Morse reached out his hand, fingers twitching as he searched for Max’s. Max obliged, and Morse held their hands close to his chest. They didn’t do anything but look into each other’s eyes for a couple of minutes.

“I’m sorry our appointment was essentially cancelled,” said Morse eventually.

“That’s all right,” said Max, “I don’t mind. You never know, there could be another body for me tomorrow. Or you could come around to my house.”

“I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” said Morse, “but thank you.”

Oh God, thought Max. Staring into Morse’s eyes was like staring into a whirlpool. Which, he supposed, was why Morse was how he was. He wanted to embrace him, make love to him, show him that everything would be all right.

But for now, he contented himself with the way they were, watching Morse gently stroking his thumb down Max’s hand and drinking brandy while the sun shines in through the window and runs its long fingers through his hair.

**Author's Note:**

> so yeah i'm the biggest morse/max hoe now but you can blame the morseverse discord for that one


End file.
